Before you get started, you must first understand what Rails is: it is a framework of web function development, which happens to be written in Ruby language. One of the most interesting things about this application is that it is created to be easy to handle. It enables to user to complete more languages because they spend less time writing codes.

Rails is also designed to do things the best way. So, when you’re using Rails, it’s best to go with the way that it’s telling you to in order to increase your efficiency. If you don’t you might find yourself struggling your way through. Whenever you write a code, don’t repeat it since Rails thinks this is a bad idea.

The application data as well as guidelines on how to handle it is symbolized by a model. With Rails, models are mainly utilized for managing the rules of contact with a matching database table. The majority of the time, one application model equals the table in the database.

Rails is based on Representational State Transfer (better known as REST). It relies on two special values, which are: to represent sources by identifying them with URLs, and to transfer that representation between components.

In order to create a new rails project, there are different steps that you must follow. The result will be an extremely simple blog. The first part is to install Rails, which can be done using RubyGems. Keep in mind that it’s recommended to use Linux rather than Windows in order to install Rails.

Then you proceed to create the blog application. When you do so, Rails will create a folder under that same name “blog” that will contain different files for different purposes. After doing so, it is important to install the required Gems with Bundler. Whenever you are configuring the application, you will have to specify what database you will be using. Then you proceed to configuring that same database (configure both SQLite3 and MySQL databases).

After completing all the steps above, you proceed to start a database, which will be empty. Consequently, you simply get the Rails application server running and you will be immediately greeting Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is fairly new. It was developed in 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson as a byproduct to Basecamp. The reason that pushed Hansson to develop Rails was that Basecamp, even though it ran on Ruby, was not potent or flexible enough because they used PHP and Java. During that time, they did not count with the system that is accessible today. In order to make the development simpler, Hansson made his own framework, which he happened to base off simple ideas he had already tried out some other place.

Hansson based Rails on a pattern that breaks the application into three different parts. This pattern follows a Model / View / Controller sample. As you may already know, the models are your business objects describing the structure of a specific trouble, which your application is trying to resolve. The models are typically backed by a framework that carries the objects on to the database.

Then, the views are the patterns that provide data to the developer or user and the entire logic, which happens to be immediate in the different facets of the application. And the controller is the focal point of the whole system. It receives and deals with the different clients’ requests, as well as starting any needed changes in the models and generating the interpretation of the patterns.

Rails is famous for almost thinking on its own. This means that it doesn’t work to please everyone but rather on doing things the best way it knows how to. You may try to go against it and do things your own way, but you will definitely be better off just following what Rails says. This is a strong reason why Rails has been successful since its release.

When Hansson was developing Rails, he had programmer productivity in mind instead of performance. This generated many complaints and the truth is that many people were not happy.

One of the main complaints from users is that Rails doesn’t scale. However, even though it happens to be slower than PHP, programmers have been able to prove otherwise. Many have faith that Rails will only start to get stronger and a lot faster. In comparison to other languages,
Ruby is far from being slow; other implementations have been able to support this. Despite the negative talk that has been spreading around, Ruby will end up outdoing other frameworks.

Effective programming is a must for developing any web application and Ruby On Rails has made an impressive name in terms of contemporary programming. Let us look back about its birth and the reasons why it is so much in demand?

Ruby On Rails is a programming language came into existence in 1995 and its creator was Yukihiro Matsumoto. Actually this can be called as the connecting link between Smalltalk and Perl languages. Ruby On rails is a beautiful programming language which always makes its programmers happy with the help of Rails. Rails also intensify the beauty of the Ruby by making it more effective and productive in the field of web application development.

Ruby is based on the concept of Object Oriented programming and hence is a dynamic programming language. Ruby On Rails is very much helpful in the development of the web applications by interacting with the database and acting as a model or prototype web applications. The motorhome New Zealand method followed by this programming language is Principle of least surprise (POLS) which has shed many inhibitions in terms of software programming.

Many of us might be thinking what is this rails? Rails is a type of programming community in which the application acts as a prototype by having an interface with the database and thus allows the programmer to see the developing web application while making modifications in it. Programmer can have a clear cut view of the developing web application with the help of model view controller framework.

All you need is the web server and the database to be able to develop a simple and efficient web application. Rails is well compatible with many web servers and databases, so is very useful in the field of content management, online social communities alliance, e-commerce etc.

Ruby as described by the author here is an object-oriented and dynamic programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in the year 1995. It have been described as a cross combination of Smalltalk and Perl. It is referred to programming language used for writing codes. Rails on the other hand is an approach to use Ruby as the solutions for various Web application problems.

Ruby on Rails is a framework for web applications written in the programming language Ruby. It does provide a various way of speedy prototyping of the web applications that uses the interface to a common database to support the modification and development of the application to a great level of sophistication. It is said to have followed the Principle Of Least Surprise (POLS) and have done away with a lots of barrier in the entry to the field of Software programming. Rail is said to provide scaffolding programming an approach where the application that is made is supported and generally based on the database and the programmer has the flexibility to write/modify the application database with the help of view controller framework. It does help in creating model views in a fast and effective manner. The effect of rails has not only been limited in the rails community but have also effected other communities globally generally in a positive manner.
With an existing web sever and database, the Ruby on Rails development environment helps you in making easy and simple web application with a fluent interactive and function level. Due to its decent amount of flexibility, Ruby on Rails well equipped for various things like. Content management, e- commerce development, Os commerce, Online social networks/communities and collaboration. Another reason for the smooth process of creating web application using Rails is that it still performs well with huge range of web database and servers.

The Author here points out how Zed Shaw the creator of a immensely famous library and web server for Rails called Mongrel, has posted the rant of the year already even when its just the first day of the year i.e. January 1st.
Zed Shaw who happens to be a writer, musician and a software developer is generally well known for the creation of the Mongrel web server for the applications for Ruby which was approved by the creators of Ruby and was pointed out as the first scalable ruby server ever made. He is however often criticized for his opinions on technology and business.
Here is an identical situation. It was expected as the disappointment level of Zed Shaw was noticed before regarding various issues discussed later on.
According to the author the rant was something like where he states his planned exit from Ruby and Rails community, and that he doesn’t want to be addressed as a ‘Ruby guy ‘ anymore, he also indicated his probable projects involving Python, Factor and Lua,- several other programming languages in the up coming months will not use much of Ruby anymore.
According Zed Shaw, this rant is full or stories about those companies and peoples who have supposedly done wrong and befriended peoples in various certain occasions. He also made it clear that everything he had written is true and that he can back them all up from various sources like emails, IRC char logs and/or with witnesses. He also mentioned nothing here is a lie, unless it is considered to be a lie already and that this rant contains a lot of his personal opinions too.
It seems that the author is not happy at all with this ranting on Zed Shaw’s part as he calls him a maniac and also states the possibility of him being from New Jersey pointing out his willingness to fight on a sudden change of mind.

Ruby on Rails is a well known and accepted framework for web development, mostly famous for its great speed. It is an application tool that provides the web developer all the structure for all the coding they write. This framework also helps the user to build sites and several applications. Rails is written in a programming language called Ruby an well known programming language which is generally popular for the elegance and directness of the language among several web developers.

A security up-gradation on this matter was made by the creator of The Ruby on Rails project Heinemeier Hansson as a patch which he mentioned to be a must install to fix a critical vulnerability. This patch was released on Wednesday on a blog post by the Heinemeier Hansson himself.

He declared this patch to be mandatory and to be installed as soon as possible, as it expected to fix a major loop hole, he also compared this situation with, how wearing a helmet is a must while trying to go 100 mph on a motorbike through downtown in pick hours, so to express the importance of this matter.

He also mentioned that the issue for which the patch was made only effects Ruby on Rails version 1.0 and the later versions. However he did not want to discuss the problem in details, probably cause of security issues.

It is also found that Heinemeier Hansson have been working on a Wiki clone which is called Instiki, it runs on rails and the main focus is on its stability and portability, it also supports several other features like, uploading of files, LaTeX export, RSS feeds, S5 Slideshows, multiple user and also can be password protected. He also referred it to be very easy and simple to set up and that the current version is 0.11.0.

One of the interesting things about Mephisto blogging software is the unique fact that it actually runs on Rails instead of the common PHP. The truth is it is very attractive because it provides a superb and neat look on the background. It comes with an editor that allows you to change the template whenever you feel like it without requiring any type of special assistance.

Although it doesn’t have too many additional themes or perhaps even plug-ins to alter the practicality of the blog it still remains very convenient. It can be perfect for those who have an enhanced knowledge about designing and also for those who know how to develop web sites and web based products. This is due to the fact that the platform hasn’t really evolved since it was first created.

Mephisto was actually created by a team of two people because one was an expert on CMS while the other was on Ruby on Rails. They first discussed their independent projects and realized that they wanted the same thing and therefore decided to work together.

The creators of Mephisto had established that they wanted a pluggable system that was very straightforward yet stunning and light and they started working full throttle on their project in 2006. They truly believe that this will utterly be the best system for blogging and publishing purposes given that they have been working on it for only a few years.

There are important plans for the blog platform that are yet to come. They have stated that in order for it to succeed they need the support of a community. So for all of those that have been interested in Mephisto, know that you can contribute with your grain of salt. You can start by subscribing to their feed and stay updated.

I’m starting this section on the Mephisto site to talk about breaking changes as I develop. There are certain things (regarding the liquid templates especially) that are rapidly changing. The first big change is the loss of the sections variable.

Until now, you could use {% for section in sections.list %} to enumerate through the sections. I’ve started converting everything to Liquid Drops and decided to create a ‘site’ drop instead. Change the above to {% for section in site.sections %}. There are a few odd cases that I’ve added:

If you want to do something else like, list all but home sections, this is how we’re doing it now:

{% for section in site.sections %}
{% if section.path != ‘home’ %}

{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

I’m still experimenting and looking for the best option. Let me know if you have suggestions.

What is a Liquid Drop?

Here’s a quick Liquid Drop crash course. By default, it lets you set up variables used in the templates as hashes. When you do {{ article.title }}, it converts that to article[‘title’] basically. Sometimes though, you don’t want to preload everything. If selecting an article always selected the http://www.koopa.com/ comments and sections every time, the site could get pretty slow.

So, here come Liquid Drops. They are basically a blank slate liquid variable. It can wrap around a liquid variable’s existing keys, and provide custom methods that load data. Something like {{ site.sections }} will now load all the sections the first time they’re accessed.

This gives us the possibility of performing some custom operations in the future, like {{ site.find_section(‘foo’).articles }}. This also lets someone make a Flickr plugin, for instance, with: {% for image in flickr.recent_images %}. Wouldn’t that be cool?

The story of Mephisto

Mephisto was born out of two projects. I (Justin Palmer) had been working on a CMS system myself dubbed “ArticleCast” at the same time Rick Olson was working on what used to be Mephisto. It turns out that I’m nowhere near as good at Ruby or Rails as Rick is, and in the same respect, Rick wasn’t all that fancy at UI design and Photoshop.

We started talking about our separate projects in the depths of IRC and decided our end goal was pretty much the same. We wanted a simple, beautiful, light-weight publishing system that was pluggable. We wanted to write a publishing system that we wanted to use and was perfect for us. After realizing we both could benefit by consolidating our efforts into one system, we stuck with the name Mephisto and started working on what you see today on February 10th 2006 (Basecamp, not just project management, it’s a keepsake for memories). We took a fairly big break not long after that because we were both so busy, so, we haven’t been actively developing Mephisto that long.

Now, here we are today with what we think will soon be the best blogging/publishing system you can get. In the short period of active development we’ve managed to do some amazing things. We’re not the only ones that think this either. Mephisto has proven it can hold it’s own and is powering high-traffic blogs such as The official Ruby on Rails weblog and mission-critical sites such as RailsMachine.

We’ve got big plans for Mephisto and we hope you’ll help us out along the way. In order to make Mephisto better, we’ll need the help of a community, and maybe the occasional Coca-cola (+beer, +coffee). If you want to help, we want you to know how you can help. We tried to hire some fairies and leprechauns, but their rates where pushing the limits of our non-existant budget.

Enough fairy talk, here’s the scoop on how you can help and also a little bit about the Mephisto project.

Getting involed

We also have a community editable wiki that I’ve kick started with some initial documentation that should help you get things up and running. If there is any helpful information you can add, please do. The wiki can be found here for now: Mephisto Wiki

An official release

We want to cleanup any of the annoying bugs that are popping up as more people have started using Mephisto. Once we get rid of these bugs, then we’ll probably do a 0.5 release and announce it on the blog. (Perhaps a week from now).

Development Focus

Our goal is to keep the Mephisto core as slim as we can. We want to make it pluggable so we can do just this.

At the moment, Mephisto supports pluggable text filters and macros that can be distributed as Rails plugins. This area still needs some looking into, but for the most part things should be fairly workable on this front. Take a look here for an introduction: Introduction to Text Filters and Macros for Mephisto.

Mephisto also contains Liquid/Template based plugins and themes. You can check out more info on the liquid plugins here: Writing Liquid Plugins for Templates

What’s To Come

We want to make sure what we have now is polished before we start adding additional core features. We’ve been discussing file management, multi-site administration, and spam prevention. These are all things that we’ll start looking into after the 0.5 release. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure in place for both of these things, like at http://londonapartmentsrental.co.uk/, it’s just a matter of getting it finished, polished, and pushed.

How You Can Help

We know that you’ve got ninja skills only a mother could love, but we’ll embrace your freakish talents as well. So, on that note, we’d like to ask your help.

Templates: If you’ve ported a publicly released template over to Mephisto, please add it here: Mephisto Templates

Converters: At the moment we only have converters for Typo and Textpattern. If you can write importers for other systems like WordPress, Blogger, etc, that would be great. If you can’t write one and have some sample data from one of these system, please post it to the mailing list to see if someone else can write an importer for it.

Filter/Macro Plugins: If you write any filter or macro plugins that you don’t mind sharing, please post them here: Mephisto Filters and Macros

Liquid/Template Plugins: If you write any liquid/template plugins that you don’t mind sharing, please post them here: Mephisto Liiquid Plugins

Evangelism: Pimpin’ ain’t easy, so if you can give Mephisto a plug, or blog about your (hopefully positive) experience with Mephisto, we’d be forever in debt to you.

Ruby is a dynamic and object-oriented programming language created in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. It has been described as a cross between Smalltalk and Perl. Ruby is, more than anything else, a language for writing beautiful code that makes programmers happy. Rails, then, is an attempt to mold the beauty and productiveness of Ruby into a solution for Web applications.

What is Ruby on Rails is a web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. It provides a way of quickly prototyping web applications that interface to a database and then supports the development of the application to greater levels of sophistication. It follows principle of least surprise (POLS) and has lowered the barrier in entry to software programming. Rails provides scaffolding programming (software application is built that is well supported by database and programmer has the flexibility to write about application database using model view controller framework) which helps to quickly and easily construct model views. Its effects are not confined to rails community but have also affected other communities globally.

With your web server and database, the RoR development environment assists you develop simple and complete web application with fluent interactivity and functionality. Due to the flexibility it gives Ruby on Rails is well crafted for content management, e-commerce development, oscommerce, online social communities and collaboration. Since Rail performs well with huge range of web databases and servers it is trully easy to create web applications using Rails.

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It's nice to have another beautiful site in the collective. Next on the list is LocusFocus, by Mark Daggett. The site serves as a homepage for the LocusFocus studio, while providing a blog for RAM and his plugins. Another great looking and unique Mephisto site, with some quite interesting photography. Also, check out RAM, Mark's Ruby Asset Manager. Always nice to see more great OSS rails apps out there.

So, maybe Mephisto has lost that lightweight blog engine feeling. It's evident that many people have been focusing on writing a kick ass publishing engine and trying to get break away from the standard articles/archives/tags/ accessories category blog feel. They've worked hard to keep it simple enough to run one of those straightforward blogs if you want, but Mephisto really starts to shine once you start expanding. There are also rumors of a Mephisto installation hosting several thousands of blogs, how cool is that?